Writer Guidelines
A Peek at the Peak
Magazine
July 1, 2003
The Greater Pinnacle Peak Association (GPPA) provides A
Peek at the Peak Magazine (The Peak) as a community service. GPPA’s
goals are to foster community activism and community service, support desert
preservation and support wildlife conservation. The Peak is a
family-oriented, community publication primarily for readers in the north
Scottsdale, Carefree and Cave Creek area. We accept articles that help GPPA
meets its goals and that are of interest to The Peak’s readership. Articles
submitted by advertisers are evaluated using these criteria.
The primary goal of these guidelines is make it easier for
contributors to write and submit articles. These guidelines will be
revised and expanded. We encourage you to make suggestions for improving these guidelines.
Submissions
We welcome submissions from amateur and professional
writers. The Peak is a great place to have an article published for the
first time. We are a non-profit organization and we do not pay for submissions.
In return for allowing us to publish your work, you will receive a byline and we
will include a link to your home page or showcase site.
We do not copyright any work that is sent to us because the
writer retains all rights to his/her work. Please do not send us work that has
been copyrighted by any other publication unless you have retained ownership.
We retain the right to edit the submission and publish it on the GPPA Web
site..
If possible, please send your submissions in a Microsoft
Word document on a 3.5-inch computer disk or a CD formatted for IBM. E-mail
submissions are encouraged. You may either attach the document containing your
article or cut and past the article into the body of your e-mail (minus any
illustrations).
To be included in an issue, submissions must be received no
later than the issue’s closing date published in
The
Peak’s Media Kit.
Writing Style
The last thing we want to do is suppress creativity.
However, if you are about to write your first article for The Peak, we
suggest reviewing the articles in a recent issue of the magazine.
This review will give you an idea of the types of articles we publish and the writing
style of our contributors. To ensure consistency in punctuation,
capitalization, etc., we use the New York Times
Manual of Style and Usage to edit articles. If you do a lot of writing, you
will find this book to be very useful. It is available at major book stores and
at Amazon.com.
Length
The first question everybody asks is how many words we
want. We are flexible. We want contributors to write as much or as little as
they think it takes to meet the objectives of the piece. Most of the articles
in The Peak are between 500 and 1200 words in length. Announcements tend to be
shorter and feature articles tend to be longer. The best thing to do is to let
us know what you are thinking about writing and we can discuss the appropriate
length.
Sub Headings
We encourage our contributors to use sub headings to make
their articles easier to read. Sub headings should identify the topic or subject
covered by the following paragraph or paragraphs.
Additional Information for Reader
Contributors should conclude their
submission with a paragraph entitled, “For Additional Information.” In this
paragraph, list Web sites, phone numbers, mailing addresses, E-mail addresses,
publications, people's names that the reader can use to obtain more information
on your topic. Space is limited so only include a few references in the form
shown below:
For Additional Information
Web:
www.go_to_this_sit.com, www.and_this_one_too
Phone: Call xxxxxxx at (xxx-xxx-xxxx)
Mail: here-is-the-address
E-mail: "
Books:
Photographs and Illustrations
If your submission includes photographs or illustrations,
please contact the editor at lesconklin@gppaaz.org.
Captions
If appropriate, please provide a separate caption for each
photo or illustration. Clearly identify people in photographs and clearly mark
the photo order and which captions go with which photos. Photo credit should be
included for each photo, either “courtesy of …” or “photo by …”
Supplementary Information
Being a paper-based publication, The Peak is
constrained as to the amount of information that can be included in an article.
We plan to use the Greater Pinnacle Peak Web site to publish information that
supplements articles published in The Peak. Your article in The Peak will then
direct readers to access the gppaaz.org site for additional information. Since
this capability takes our volunteers' time to implement, it will be selectively
applied. If you are interested in taking advantage of this flexibility, contact
the editor.
Have fun writing!
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